Posts Tagged ‘IDN TLDs’

To some applicants, ICANN’s variant management policy in DAG4 has become a big obstacle to the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) application. The policy is to delegate the string while reserving the variants, and these variants will not be delegated until a sound mechanism is developed and the desired variants are evaluated. But for some […]

New IDN TLDs may pose problems for second level IDN holders.
For years, domain names were only available in roman characters. Domain names in these characters don’t make a lot of sense to web users who’s primary languages don’t use these characters.
But then so-called International Domain Names (IDNs) using non-roman characters became available. Domainers […]

Like most original internet standards, the DNS was designed to initially suit the needs of any section of the world that could communicate using 7-bit ASCII and Latin character sets. Then the internet became really popular. Everywhere. The DNS had to evolve to cope with naming schemes that came from alphabets all over the world.

IDN is up for discussion again at the 31st ICANN meeting on Monday. This time, the world’s registry community are meeting in New Delhi, one of the most significant IT regions of the non-Latin world, to discuss the remaining “glitch” in the IDN system. An IDN might look like this: .com. Therefore any user still needs to be able to type .com in order to reach the resource they request. There is a proposal at the ICANN meeting to add Internationalised top-level domains, actual complimentary TLDs to .com, that will mean that resources can be reached in any supported alphabet.

This is interesting stuff. One school of thought is that this could significantly assist the development of electronic enterprise in many more pockets of the world. The supremacy of Silicon Valley as the web’s main economy would then be broken. I think differently – I think that .com is now too established as the main ecommerce ‘brand’ TLD, and attempts to localise the meaning of .com will be fruitless. .com means “I trade online”. Despite .biz and similar TLDs being equal in technical terms, they are not equal in the eyes of shoppers or traders. .com now has specific global meaning, and can’t be diluted.

ICANN hears this question all the time at meetings, events, in different online forums, on the idn.icann.org wiki, and in emails and phone calls. The great challenge is it the answer isn’t the specific “as of this date” answer so many people want to hear. Because of the nature of some critical functions that still […]

Posted on January 31, 2008, 10:30 pm, by Internationalized Domain Names, under ICANN.

In October 2006, ICANN engaged Autonomica AB of Stockholm, Sweden, to develop, conduct, and report on the results of laboratory testing of internationalized top-level domains in a setting corresponding to the public root. On

1. .test IDN TLD Evaluations On 9 October 2007, eleven evaluation-purpose IDN TLDs were inserted into the root zone and propagation was initiated to the 13 root servers. These IDN TLDs were inserted into the root zone as part of the .test Program that was subsequently launched on 15 October 2007 at 4.10am PDT. The […]